"It's over. The magic is gone. The dream is dead. The egg has fallen off the wall and no amount of 'sudo' super glue can put his pieces back together again. I'm referring, of course, to the not-so-recent departure of Con Kolivas from the Linux kernel development community. Con - that champion of all things desktop centric - hung-up his keyboard this summer, the victim of an ideological rift within the Linux community." Update: And the first rebuttal appeared.

Having read the interview with Con and the thread on LKML discussing the issue, I have to say Con comes off as a thin-skinned primadonna that is just making a big stink that his code didn't get into the kernel. SD and CFS were put through a few benchmarks and came out with very similar performance for most tasks, with each having their ups and downs, but CFS being more consistent across a wider range of usage scenarios.

Linus has faith in Ingo as a maintainer, and if nothing else, this little debacle weeded out Con early in the game, rather than having something similar happen later, when the SD scheduler is already in place. Kernel development is not instant gratification or feel-good. It's very dog-eat-dog, and although Linus can be an asshole, he's usually right.

I think a better solution would be something along the lines of the Kernel settings notebook in xWorkplace for eComStation, where the user has a number of scheduling, multitasking and memory management customizations for the kernel at their disposal